I know it's still a great game, question is if it's playable for a player that doesn't pay?
Ask yourself what your goals are. If you're fine roleplaying, progressing slowly and just messing around, then you'll probably be fine.
If you actually want to participate decent PvP activities and be among the top, you'll either be underdog for a very long time or you can forget about it.
Getting gold isn't hard so to say, it's just a rather boring and tedious process. If you haven't been playing for a while now, then you're most likely a lot behind in terms of boutique stuff as well, so you'd need tons.
Alternatively you can mess around on the new Steam server or the P2P (this does cost a low amount of money though, however pretty affordable). The downside is that you can expect them both to be borderline empty.